Статья о "кремлеботах" в Гардиан

"Salutin' Putin: inside a Russian troll house"

Статья, как я понял, о том же заведении, о котором не так давно вышла намного более подробная статья в "Новой Газете", "Как стать тролльхантером", но журанлист Гардиан поговорил с другими его работниками.

Я статью в "Новой Газете" не осилил, а в "Гардиан" осилил, так что приведу несколько отрывков.

The LiveJournal blogger, who spent two months working at the centre until mid-March, said she was paid 45,000 roubles (£520, $790) a month, to run a number of accounts on the site. There was no contract - the only document she signed was a non-disclosure form. She was ordered not to tell her friends about the job, nor to add any of them to the social media accounts she would run under pseudonyms.

“We had to write ‘ordinary posts’, about making cakes or music tracks we liked, but then every now and then throw in a political post about how the Kiev government is fascist, or that sort of thing,” she said.

Scrolling through one of the LiveJournal accounts she ran, the pattern is clear. There are posts about “Europe’s 20 most beautiful castles” and “signs that show you are dating the wrong girl”, interspersed with political posts about Ukraine or suggesting that the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is corrupt.

Интересно, что это описание идентично тому, о чем буквально на днях написал e_mir:

Уже стало правилом - если ко мне стучатся в личку или пишут в верхний пост "о, привет, мне нравится что ты пишешь, давай дружить" - то я с почти стопроцентной точностью знаю, что увижу, зайдя в жж соискателя дружбы.

Там будет очень аккуратненький, весь такой правильный блог - аккаунт платный, каждый пост с картиночкой, и будьте уверены что все seo-шные теги под ней верно заполнены, снизу, обязательно - ряд иконок соцсетей чтоб легко было поделиться этой роскошью. Темы - от котиков до вкусной еды, через спорт и до стихов (редко). И все бы хорошо, только вот где-то каждый седьмой-десятый пост про любимое российское начальство, о том как оно отражает атаки гнилостного Запада, про фашистскую хунту Украины. А затем - снова котики, вкусная нямка, детишки и спорт.

Снова из Гаридан:

“The scariest thing is when you talk to your friends and they are repeating the same things you saw in the technical tasks, and you realise that all this is having an effect,” the former worker said.

Как обычные люди дали настолько задурить себе голову? Это меня до сих пор удивляет.

To add colour to their posts, websites have been set up to aid the troll army. One features thousands of pasteable images, mainly of European leaders in humiliating photoshopped incidents or with captions pointing out their weakness and stupidity, or showing Putin making hilarious wisecracks and winning the day.

Many of them have obvious racist or homophobic overtones. Barack Obama eating a banana or depicted as a monkey, or the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, in drag, declaring: “We are preparing for European integration.” The trolls have to post the photographs together with information they can pull from a website marketed as a “patriotic Russian Wikipedia”, featuring ideologically acceptable versions of world events. [...]

After two months of working in the troll agency, Marat began to feel he was losing his sanity, and decided he had to leave. From the snatched conversations over coffee, he noted that the office was split roughly 50/50 between people who genuinely believed in what they were doing, and those who thought it was stupid but wanted the money. Occasionally, he would notice people changing on the job.

“Of course, if every day you are feeding on hate, it eats away at your soul. You start really believing in it. You have to be strong to stay clean when you spend your whole day submerged in dirt,” he said.

The most prestigious job in the agency is to be an English-language troll, for which the pay is 65,000 roubles.

Картинка в Гардиан для иллюстрации такая.

Интересные новости

Полтора года прочитал бы подобное, подумал бы, что полный бред. А сейчас легко верится.

Russia threatens to use 'nuclear force' over Crimea and the Baltic states

Russia has threatened to use “nuclear force” to defend its annexation of Crimea and warned that the “same conditions” that prompted it to take military action in Ukraine exist in the three Baltic states, all members of Nato.

According to notes made by an American at a meeting between Russian generals and US officials – and seen by The Times newspaper - Moscow threatened a “spectrum of responses from nuclear to non-military” if Nato moved more forces into Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

The Russians told the meeting, which took place in Germany last month, that an attempt to return Crimea to Ukraine would be met “forcefully including through the use of nuclear force”.

And they said if Nato sent arms to Ukraine this would be seen as “further encroachment by Nato to the Russian border” and “the Russian people would demand a forceful response”.

They added that “the same conditions that existed in Ukraine and caused Russia to take action there” existed in the three Baltic states, which like Ukraine have significant numbers of people who regard themselves as ethnically Russian.

Russia was considering taking steps in the Baltics, according to the notes, but this would most likely be “destabilising actions that would be even harder to trace back to Russia than those of eastern Ukraine”.

The notes suggest Moscow would avoid “injections of troops and heavy weapons in favour of other tools”.

“Russia would hope slowly to entice those Russian populations towards Russia without giving Nato a pretext to deploy troops,” the document adds.

If Nato then responded, that would make it “a potential co-aggressor against Russian-speaking minorities in Baltic states”, a situation described as “potentially more dangerous than that in Ukraine to the United States”.